WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross is often considered to be the greatest announcer in wrestling history. He brings his incredible celebrity roster of friends, his insights, and his analysis into one show, “The Ross Report”. On episode 127 of The Ross Report, JR caught up with Terri Runnels. Among other things, the former Marlena talked about coming up with the Marlena character. Also, Ross made an interesting claim, that Marlena was supposed to have a prosthetic p*nis.
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On the show, Terri admitted that she came up with the idea of creating the Marlena character for WWE while laying in a tanning bed.
In a lengthy conversation with JR, Terri said:
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“When I came up with the character of Marlena, I was laying in the tanning bed in our home in Stockbridge, Georgia. Dustin’s on the road. I’m there with Dakota and absolutely loving being a mommy. It’s not like I was saying, ‘God, I’ve got to get out of this house – I can’t do this’. I was happier than a pig in poop. But also, I’m a very creative person and I think it’s very easy for me to stand back and look at something with an overall view and say ‘there’s a deficit there, that needs that, okay, this needs the addition of this component or that’ and I was doing the same things.” Terri added, “A month later, Dustin called me and said, ‘where are you? Pack your bags. They want to do your idea, so that’s how that came to be. Here’s the lovely thing about that character: there was not one thing about that character anybody created other than me. Not one thing about that character. Now, storyline-wise, there were plenty of storylines that were created for that character, but everything about that character, not one of you guys created and I love knowing that the inception and the continuation of that character was everything that I conceived of in that tanning bed.”
Jim Ross also recounted talks of including a prosthetic p*nis with Marlena’s costume, to which Terri revealed the creative meeting that would have given her character an artificial male appendage.
Runnels also said:
“I remember having creative meetings, Vince and I, probably Pat and maybe Bruce, Bruce Prichard. One meeting, a creative meeting, we had about the character, was that there was a consideration to have the Marlena character have a prosthetic p*nis and that the p*nis would be, at certain times, depending on what Marlena wore, in a very subtle way, one could detect that there’s something going on there that is not normal.”
